Hamlet, the Ditherer

I have a strange confession to make. I don’t much like Hamlet. All right, that in and of itself isn’t really that strange of a confession. If my AP Lit class were polled, it wouldn’t surprise me to find Hamlet being the most common least favorite text. Of course, we did spend almost two months on it, two grueling unpleasantly dreary months. Winter had arrived, in earnest, and its harbinger was Hamlet. But, that aside, my problems with Hamlet have little to do with where or when I studied it. Rather, it’s that I studied it at all.

            I used to accept the sequence of events in Hamlet for granted. I mean, its so simple really. Prince sees his father’s ghost, his father’s ghost tells his son he was murdered, his son swears revenge, his son then…takes three acts to do nothing, except miss multiple occasions to do nothing until his mother and himself are dying. Now, it was at a breakdown similar (though far more elegant) to this, that I realized the play’s plot makes no sense in the traditional sense, and especially in relation to its genre.

Hamlet belongs to that most rarified of Elizabethan genres, the revenge tragedy. It, like bear baiting and public executions are the kind of refined pass-times that appealed to the slasher film demographic of merry-old-England, which according to their popularity, was almost everyone. Essentially, the revenge tragedy has three parts. Theirs is the opening, when a ghost or on occasion the “spirit of revenge” revels itself to a man who is then tasked with taking revenge. The second part is the avenger creating a long and Machiavellian plot to murder the evil doer. The play then ends, as a result of the plan, in an orgy of violence, leaving everyone including the avenger, dead.

Now, let’s see how Hamlet compares to this formula. Hamlet is tasked by the ghost of his father to take revenge. Check. Hamlet ends with every character except Fortinbras and Horatio dead. Check. Hamlet lays incredibly intricate plans that in no way relate to that orgy of violence. Ch- wait. That’s the problem really, the middle section of Hamlet is just Hamlet going on numerous diversions that do not add to his revenge, in particular the play, which in most revenge tragedies would have been the moment that Hamlet would strike.

Indeed, a play is vital in at least two revenge tragedies, The Spanish Tragedie which helped to popularize the genre, and an odd tale, of a Scandinavian youth who keeps carving wooden hooks throughout the story, and at the end, during a play, it’s revealed he used them to hang a great net over the court, and once ensnared he begins butchering all of the guilty parties. Hamlet though, and Hamlet, for that matter, constantly hesitates.

And this is the real problem with Hamlet. Hamlet. He is a character, who is completely inappropriate for his assigned task. He is a good Christian, and so hesitates in the cloister when Claudius is unable to pray. He is an intellectual, and hence questions the ghost, and with that and his Christianity, he wonders if the creature that appeared to him was the devil. In Hamlet, the point of the Mouse Trap, is to see if the Ghost was accurate in his assertion of Claudius’s guilt. He does not want to kill, but he must, and so he is put into a kind of limbo, for to act is to destroy his sense of self and not to act is to be destroyed. And in the end, in his most perplexing and unexplained move, he gives control of his nation, to their enemy, Norway.

And, for me anyways, although it makes for fascinating character study, Hamlet makes for fairly muddled viewing. I prefer the much more straightforward plays, Macbeth and King Lear, which also have terrific character studies, but flow logically in terms of plot, because their stories have other less mad individuals to drive the story along. But maybe that’s just my post-MTV generation, short attention span talking. I’m sure that’s where Harold Bloom would put the blame for me disliking his treasured Hamlet. Or maybe on a lack of imagination on my part, for having read Harry Potter. But who cares for him, he's just a bag of wind. (I apologize for the seemingly unprovoked ad hominem attack, but for those wondering about its source, please read this: 1xn.org/softspeakers/PDFs/bloom.pdf )